


Like a Needle to a Lodestone: Kankri in the Era of Benevolent Rationality

by RainofLittleFishes



Series: The Era of Benevolent Rationality [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternian Empire, Art, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Discussion of Rape, Ethics, Families of Choice, Helmsman, Kankri may be dangerous to the government - but not for the reasons they might have guessed, Multi, Pets, Tattoos, Terrible things that happened in the Alternian Empire but are over except for the fallout, Troll Culture, becoming part of something greater than yourself, discussion of grub death, discussion of violation of autonomy, the tragedy of unequal lifespans among the castes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-17 00:38:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3508610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Plenty of trolls have jobs, without one you might eat, but not well or without worry. What trolls don’t always remember is that a vocation is not just a job. A vocation means you were called to it. </p>
<p>Kankri juggles his ever expanding responsibilities, his need to relieve suffering, his inability to let injustice go unanswered, his conviction that there is something wrong and he has to fix it. Meenah is there to remind him that he’s more than what he owes. Porrim finds an old betrayal come back to bite her in a manner she never anticipated and she’s not sure she minds. Tattoowasps. Kinky pitch solicitations. Shameful secrets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Pink Moon grub is fair of form,  
Green Moon grub is quick of horn,  
Noon Hatched grub is full of woe,  
Dusk Hatched grub has far to go,  
Dawn Hatched grub will weather the storm,  
Eclipse’s grub will be by love forsworn,  
But the grub who is hatched in a great troll’s shadow,  
Had best appease them, lest their pails lie fallow.

*

You are Kankri Maryam and you are very careful not to touch the dead with your bare hands. You are very careful not to let anyone know that sometimes you can hear and see and smell and taste and touch something that happened to them. It is not the same as a ghost or haunt. It is not precognition. You don’t get it from objects, even ones of great emotional significance, or ones made of troll bones or skin or hair. You only perceive these sensations from dead flesh, though thankfully not animal meat. You don’t know if it would work on non-troll sentients. It is usually very unpleasant. The most recent strong emotional experience always ends in death.

You know what it’s like to die choking on your own blood, or to lose two limbs and be unable to fasten a tourniquet in time, or to be crushed in a rock fall. In the last case, the genetic repository was entirely burst and there was nothing to salvage.

*

You are equally secretive that most eggs also reveal secrets, but they are more pleasant ones and this is a secret you cherish.

The thrill of recognition of a caretaker’s face, the first whiff of sweetened beetles at a festival, the soft chirr of a content wriggler, safe, loved. Sometimes you know deeper things.

This wriggler will go far and speak clearly. This one will know great sorrow but also triumph.

You have known what it feels like to fly, several dozen psionics already, somehow, eager in their eggs, and once even, you knew that there would be wings. You are relieved that that egg came from private contract and was not a state-sponsored grub. You have little control over whom the state determines should raise a purchased grub, but no would-be custodian or brooder or contributor gets a private contract before you have determined them unlikely to ever intentionally harm a grub or wriggler and you are immune to bribes of the monetary kind.

Once, you saw a face above a uniform and knew this would be a future colleague. It was a surreal feeling, only a flash of their face, and then their regarding of you as experienced from their eyes and horns and nose. Your face was still without noticeable age, no change to height you think, scent still not yet quite adult. There was no sense of the time elapsed, how many sweeps in the future it may have been, or, rather, will be. Strangest of all was that you felt it from their side; their pride to stand before you, their surety that you were all-knowing within the territory of your realm. They were intelligent and well-meaning, and desperately eager to impress you, with more than a slight sense of a crush between flush and pale. The secret held in this egg is a source of pride and shame.

You cannot help but be proud. Proud of your colleagues at PAP’D, who have become a force for professional excellence, and professional ethics, despite prevailing forces. Proud of this still unhatched grub that will join you someday. In your most secret of places you are also proud of yourself and your part in it, but it its always chased by the shame of such hubris when you know that at the root of your industry also lies your unease, the flaw that is not of your doing, but which you cannot escape, ignore, or deal with head on.

*

When Meenah approaches ten sweeps, or at least the arrival of the night that she has staked out as her own, the real date being a mystery, she declares that your frenemy status must be enshrined in a pair of matching tattoos, or something else “stupid, but our own”. You do not disagree.

Your body is a tool, serviceable to your needs, but also in service to the Consortium, and not entirely your own. You have trained your hands and mind and voice, worked your arms and legs and torso until you can physically lift and lever and assist more perhaps than most would expect of a non-psionic Rust of your body type, but you have no particular pride in your appearance. Most of your clothes are gray and tailored to your unchanging form. It is important to be hygienic and to be and appear trustworthy. Everything else is a game you don’t care to play. Meenah tells you that you were hatched old. You sometimes wonder if you were just hatched tired.

“Nothing on the face, neck, or hands,” you provisionally agree. That the front and sides of your abdomen must go unmarked need not be mentioned. You doubt that she will try to fit any carving into the limited space of your horns.

“Shore thing, Crabko.” The flash of her needle teeth in a smirking grin is not designed to endear trust, but you already trust her implicitly and you are used to Meenah’s flash. There is no one you trust more. It is her nature to enjoy a bit of discomposure, a bit of chaos, but it is only Meenah, and not some inherently evil tyrian compulsion. You turn back to the contracts you’re reading when she leaves.

The Consortium wants more psionics, which is not unusual, _(when did the Empress ever feel otherwise?),_ but what _is_ unusual is that the none of the ColonyArk ships have ever returned to Alternia, let only under the _Order Regarding Helmsmen Conscious Consent In Alternian Orbit_. The Consortium wants slurry from all five surviving helmsmen of the Class I ColonyArk _HIC Grim Galatea,_ especially the Primary, a Teal in trir very prime, and according to ORHCCIAO, which also restored their status as citizens, the government can no longer just take it. Somehow it ended up on your desk to negotiate with them, and you suspect that it has less to do with your status at PAP’D then the fact that you’re an off-spectrum redblood and the ship culture is surprisingly Sufferist.

The Psionic’s unofficial get may make up only 4.56 percent of active helmsmen, but when you adjust the figures to count only the strongest, most consistent, most adept five percent of active helmsmen, the numbers shoot up to 34.68 percent, and the Primary of the _Galatea_ is the mirror image of trir sire, for all that tre’s a Teal and trir eyes glow lime green.

If The Psionic were ever allowed to awaken, and the BR ever admitted to owning back pay, he could probably bankrupt the administration if he cornered them into paying damages and stud fees. That, along with the fact that he can immolate planets, is probably part of why the flagship is never allowed back into Alternia’s orbit. ORHCCIAO doesn’t apply until a ship reaches Alternia. Somewhere an actuary is probably calculating how any night now the Empress’s Life powers are just going to wear off and the flagship will have a column of dust instead of a helmsman. You wonder if the hypothetical actuary sees such an eventuality as a relief or a loss. 

A lineage of ColonyArk quality teal psionics would be a coup for the Caballistas and the BR both. If the Teal, one Trinep Penirt, or rather The Calibrium, is able to pull tremself together enough to spin this right, tre could end up highly placed in the on planet administration should tre wish to be disconnected, and survive it. If tre wants to go back out into the black, tre might very well head out as the first helm to captain a ColonyArk. You would be intrigued to see the culture of the resulting colony, though you doubt you would live so long. You are already fascinated with the ship's culture. 

Even if it’s a great deal of paperwork, you’re privately cheering on the helmstrolls for not letting the Consortium have their way. Then again, maybe the fight is a good focus for them too. The waking process, despite continued improvements, still has a 5-11 percent chance of ending in a dead psionic, and while all five survived that, in fact The Calibrium was one of the rarer helms that didn't need intervention to wake, there’s still the issue of the voluntary disconnection process, which still hovers between a 7-23 percent fatality rate. The success of either is often heavily influenced not only by the skill of the technicians but by the mental stability of the psionic. Traumas far older than you are still immolating psionics and the waking crews. In those cases where relative abuse is factored in _before_ the waking process, the wide fatality range actually shakes out into a much clearer spectrum of who is likely to make it. Of all the rarer helms that were awake _before_ ORHCCIAO, not a one has died in the disconnection process due to immolation. The failure of flesh and blood bodies yes, but not from psychological trauma.

On the positive side, whatever furtive papping the softer helmstechs and engineeriquists have gotten up to in the past has been a pretty high indicator of a helm’s chances at survival. Plenty of engine crew go pale for the engine, it’s a trope because it happens, however much the Empire tried to discourage it, persecuted it when possible.

It’s just not logical to prime vocationalists to love their work and not expect them to fall for the pinnacle of their craft, the helmsman that pulls the ship’s mechanical and biological components into gestalt. Such furtive papping and gentle words, even for the helms that were most deeply under, did not go to waste. It was in many ways the unseen glue keeping badly fractured people from falling apart. When the helms were woken, some with great difficulty, it became obvious just how important that previously unseen influence was.

Of course, among the rarer always conscious helms, there were no few flush and pitch relations, and such have become more common since ORHCCIAO. There was even a rather amusing cluster-fluster last perigee wherein the engineeriquist of the _BR Slate Barkbeast_ was forced to auspisticize between the captain and the helm and the crew had started picking sides. You were called in to sort them out because despite the fact they were in orbit and two weeks past their slurry dues due date, they were too busy making interpretive sculptures over how ugly each other’s face was to either submit slurry or the fines, or consume anything other than ration bars for the past three weeks. It had been the most amusement you have gotten from your duties for quite some time. Most of your job involves less frivolity, and often far heavier emotions.

It was standard procedure on ColonyArks to have one primary powerful psionic and six strong backups. You don’t even have to state Empire era ColonyArks, because there haven’t been any since the Empire era. ColonyArks carried trolls who were more than just soldiers, but also settlers with a wide range of skills and vocations, and usually one to three matriorbs.

Like most ColonyArks, in lieu of carrying small populations of a great variety of lusii, the _Galetea_ carried one of the more diversely color divergent species of lusii to avoid a population bottleneck and still account for all the potential grub colors. In this case, it was a type of community oriented barkbeast and quite a few of them are awake and roaming the ship, herding wrigglers and begging for food in the mess, even without being assigned individual grubs. Their appearance is startling and yet they are more friendly and social than you had expected, not having much experience with lusii in general. You had certainly not expected a tongue bath from a strange lusus. The crew had pulled her off quickly and been suitably mortified but quite frankly it was the least offensive commentary on your height that you've experienced over quite a few years of such, despite the rather efficient assault on your dignity. You've dealt with far worse in terms of body fluids anyhow. It had served to break the formality at least, and there were certainly many topics of more importance and less humor to discuss. 

Being unable to put a helm in cryo while rigged, it was also standard procedure for the Empire to breed each of the backups to a different psionic on ColonyArks or Dreadnaughts going in different directions. In this manner the crew had a continuing source of fresh psionic grubs and, occasionally, fresh grubloaf. You have learned to disassociate yourself from that part. In the Empire, grubs were not precious. In the Empire, people were not always considered people. If you were to tell yourself that it did not bother you, you would be lying, but what good does your sorrow do?

In the Benevolent Rationality, it is a crime to maim or kill a grub unless the proper forms have been completed and approved to document the necessity. Wrigglers have less legal protection, especially if the perpetrator is their guardian, but you hope to change that, and The Dolorosa has been championing such laws in the Hall of Rationality. It is difficult to do the necessary research to support her, so much of the materials that could best assist are kept in hard-copy only within the caverns. You do not think on the forms that were doubtlessly filed to some triple firewalled server or perhaps even handwritten and delivered so that your own adolescent self was maimed, or perhaps, ‘surgically and chemically corrected’ to avoid the future political repercussions of an adult Red. Did they truly fear that you only awaited your adult molt to assume the duties of the Sufferer? Did they think that you plotted to overthrow them? You did not. You do not. You are as you always have been, yourself. It is foolish to retread places that only get more worn and dull within your own mind.

At least, as things stand, if nothing else, few trolls would harm an errant wriggler or grub for fear of their guardian’s retaliation, or that of their clade. Unfortunately, that still leaves a wide area for unsuitable guardians to damage their charges. Some trolls are simply not meant to care for the vulnerable. Some trolls can only take, and you do not know if it is their nature or their history that makes them so. None living know the Empress’s wrigglerhood. Did some long ago damage to a tyrian child make her the tyrant she became?

Knowing what you know as a reproductive technician, the success rate of fertilizations among the ColonyArk backups means that the Empress personally raped each of them to make sure the contributions would take. There’s no record of it, but the facts speak for themselves. She wasn’t much for subtlety when brutality was easier and more entertaining. Outside of the sheer longevity of her reign, she was really quite inefficient and terrible as a leader.

On the other end of it, the _contributing_ helmsmen produced slurry whether or not it was used, just as all adult trolls do. Even in the Empire era when helmsmen were drafted, amputated, and usually kept not quite conscious, there was still the issue of that slurry to be dealt with, just as the rest of the body’s secretions and waste had to be dealt with. Taking out limbs for ‘cost efficiency’ or ease of maintenance or just because someone likes the symbolic idea that they can’t run is one thing, but an adult troll will produce slurry unless a great deal of their reproductive system is scooped out, and that tends to be expensive and have other consequences. This results in the necessity of slurry extraction, which can be done mechanically or manually, or, well, naturally, however awkwardly the concept fits the action when one participant was not only unlikely to be able to consent, but possibly not conscious for it. While registered as equipment, a helm’s slurry, in conjunction with whatever unfortunate was without another partner, could, and often did, slate the drones.

It still bothers you to know how often the Empire era drones collected pails half-filled with contributions from the helms. With Empire era rigging, helmsmen were not only unable to escape, but most were not in any position to consent to the proceedings, whether by the legal definition of duress or the technicality of being subsumed in the ship’s functions and ignoring the existence of their wetware. Weighing the lives of unattached crew against the already compromised autonomy of the helmsmen just piles evil upon evil. You do not know what to think, how to rationalize or measure or come to terms with it. It is wrong to ignore it, but one cannot change the past. You try to hold it, gently, in the back of your mind, as you do other things, and focus on the future.

The empire turned a blind eye to crew offering filled pails without official quadrants because without it there would be less trolls to make their ships go vroom and their targets go boom. The empress was not entirely stupid. The helmsmen didn't get much say in the matter until the Summonerists created ORHCCIAO and decreed that all helms be awoken at their next Alternian planetfall and be given a choice to continue their service or retire to Alternia.

The ColonyArks, having never been intended to return to Alternia, may or may not have been woken at their destinations. The Consortium, however, is determined not to let this opportunity go to waste. You are determined not to let your part in the negotiations go to waste. There are almost fifteen thousand crewmembers/settlers alive or still in cryo shifts on the _Galatea_ and they run the spectrum of every Empire-recognized blood caste. Some of the warmer active crew are older, the Rusts are mostly gone except for those who were barely out of cryo, and no few throughout the spectrum have died in accidents or the usual toll of colonizing, but what is remarkable about the _Galatea_ is that when the colonization failed due to previously unrecognized unsuitability issues on the chosen planet, the crew pulled _together_ and not apart.

You have been aboard and met each of the helmsmen and surviving command, all mid-bloods, older warmbloods, younger coolbloods, and two violet Sufferists of all things. They are curiously, wonderfully, open to input from throughout the crew and the ship felt more like an extended clade than a military facility. The lusii for the colony almost died out on planet and the crew has been rotating custodial duties as the few dozen lusii left are still not as numerous as the underage wrigglers. Their ship patois includes vocalizations from the crew’s own lusii. More than a few lessons are related through dolphinitin or howlbeast or strikebird song.

Perhaps it is a violation of the privacy implied by intimacy, perhaps it is worse for being some sort of displaced projection of your own fantasies, but watching a Green, a Violet, and a Rust singing a lullaby in the round to a herd of wrigglers while pretending to be a howlbeast, and skywhale, and a hootbeast respectively made something soft and hard within your chest turn over and a lump rise in your throat.

The _Galatea_ ’s mothergrubs all failed. The only grubs since the ship set out 77 sweeps ago have been produced by the backup psionics and a few other crew members who volunteered to try. Of course, without tyrian intervention, only nineteen of the forty-six volunteers managed to brood, even with the intervention of their Jades and docterrorists. Should they set out again, they will likely need more warmblooded volunteers or their population will start skewing cooler. You wonder if any of them will also want tyrian intervention now that it’s an option. These at least are negotiation points, because they can advertise and sift all they want to find more trolls that can assimilate to their culture, but they will need help if they want to court some of the specialists they most need. Perhaps they will also want to take on more barkbeasts to strengthen the genetic pool. That will require some time for both acquisition and quarantine. They may have some success recruiting in rural areas were some troll still live with their lusii. The Empress would have considered them heretical and soft. You think that despite their challenges, the _Galatea_ is an enviably fine place to grow up or to serve. 

You have met or seen all 300 odd surviving “wrigglers” on board, now ranging from just hatched to 76 sweeps. More than one exhibits a congenital deformity that the Empire would have culled, but just like those crew members who survived maiming accidents, they all get on just fine without further dramatics. One grub, your possibly precognitive sense tells you, is a psionic indigo, and there is no way you want that one back on planet, they need to be safely away before anyone else catches on.


	2. Chapter 2

You return to your contracts and Meenah takes herself elsewhere and you forget about it for the next few perigees because you certainly have no few things competing for your attention.

You find yourself accosted in the clinic late one night, two hours to dawn. When the door opens, you look up from your work, and blink to refocus. Most trolls in the clinic would knock. Smart trolls would be home already. You are the only one left. Meenah leans in, and then leans in some more.

“When’s the last time you slept, Nubby-Horns?”

You don’t have a ready answer, and you will never admit that you space out a bit trying to recall. You maybe wave a few fingers trying to count up, hesitate over the half hour you lost earlier this night when you nodded off over an unfinished grant proposal, then lose track when you remember tonight’s her declared Hatching day.

“Right. You have thirty seconds to shut down and pak up before I ferry you out.”

You shut down but don’t manage to shut your personal pak before you lose another second at a shift in your surroundings. Meenah has your pak over one shoulder and you are already tucked under her other arm. She maneuvers out the office door and plops you down right before the range of the cameras in the waiting room, sleeping but motion-activated. She drapes her arm over your shoulders and propels you along with a (mostly) gentle elbow to your spine.

Your legs are moving but you’re tucked into her and she’s guiding you. Your mind seems mostly okay with taking a break. You notice flashes of the city around you but don’t make much note of any of them until she slows to open a door to an atelier in the haute bohemian cultural section where the Jade and Teal sections of town abut the Green section. It’s in a row of carefully casual studios and very expensive stores. The interior smells like incense and other things, and there are two solid doors followed by a room with chairs, a low table, a counter, and a belled and beaded curtain, clearly a business that sees daytime business. Both doors are labeled “The Daywalker’s Domicile” in a flourished script that seems somehow familiar. Inside, there are designs framed on the walls and the low table at the center of the first room features a rotating gallery of trolls sporting a variety of tattoos, piercings, and horn and grubscar modifications.

Meenah plops you in a chair and you are distracted by the variety on the table display. You find yourself staring at a pierced bulge and the display helpfully slows, a high-end piece of equipment that follows the user’s gaze. You find yourself working out in your somewhat static-y mind how long it must have taken to heal, its potential impact on slurry transmission or a partner’s nook, potential problems should one suffer an injury to the bulge while it is extended or retracted, and why, with all the genitals you have personally inspected, this is a first time anyone has brought this matter of public health to your attention.

Another beaded curtain rattles behind the desk and the proprietor arrives. You look up, feel another rattle, and find yourself growling. You cut yourself off.

Before you is a face you know well. Porrim Maryam is no orphan but a rightful inheritor of the hatchsign and basic phenotype she shares with your patron, the Dolorosa. Among the community of sixty Jades who first culled you, Porrim guided your first spoken sentences, your first written letters. Among the few items you have of your pre-Dolorosa wrigglerhood are a carefully collated collection of the fanciful beasts she once drew you as mnemonics. They are tainted now, but you cannot quite bear to dispose of them. She looks much as she did when you saw her last. Tall. Graceful. Collected. Jade. Every impossible thing that the child you once were desperately, impossibly, wanted to be.

Porrim was among the first to tell you “No” on a regular basis as you reached the upper limits of what a pet Rust should be able to access on the schoolfeeds. She said it with increasing frequency and force, until you didn’t have to ask, and you soon found yourself standing in the office of the Dolorosa, re-sold.

You can’t be betrayed unless you trust someone. Porrim was your first betrayal. You hope that there will not be others, but you are also careful to keep limits on your expectations. Meenah is so close that she is inside the arm’s length of your affections. The Dolorosa stakes out another part of you. All others are within reach, but not entirely inside. That is probably not entirely healthy, but should you outlast the standard rust lifespan, you suppose you may yet have time to work on the issue.

Since then, you have not thought of Porrim much, only every time you received a “Rusts shouldn’t worry about such matters.” or a “Who do you think you are?” In the last few sweeps this has changed to “That’s impossible.” and “The budget doesn’t cover it (yet)”, both innocent of more personal accusation, and so it really has been a while since her disapproving face and pheromones haunted the gallery of your challenges and failings.

She looks equally displeased to see you, but Meenah’s still steering this collision course of bad sense.

“Tide’s a-wasting. I’ve got a tidy bit of denarii burning my pockets for a bit of color on my buoy here.”

Porrim pulls herself together. You are already an island of polite distance. Meenah pulls out more than a few crumpled pages and Porrim flips through, ignoring you, pulls out a pen, swiftly inks sure strokes of definition, hands them back. Meenah nods.

“Shore.” And she slaps Porrim on the back, still mostly friendly but calculated to be just hard enough to make Porrim stagger. You should not be so petty as to appreciate it.

Porrim steps through the curtain and gestures you both back. You get a whiff of delicious frustration, some intrigue, some embarrassment. You can’t produce the full range of adult pheromones, but you are adept at discerning them. You are the soul of discretion at your métier. Most trolls you know, you know from some connection to it, but Porrim is neither a brooder, nor a donor, nor a sponsor, nor a colleague, nor inclade to any of them, and you owe her _absolutely nothing_. You allow yourself some petty gratification at her discomfort.

There are several chairs, a table of tools, caged wasps, and a tablechair not entirely unlike the clinic’s, complete with restraints, but the padding has claw holes on the edges of the seat and there are more than a few sets of teeth marks on the headrest. You would not have allowed it to remain in such a state at the clinic.

“Design’s for your back and maybe some pretty carving for your pretty grubscars, Kankri. Off with the shirt!” Meenah’s already reclined in a chair not meant for reclining, eyeing Porrim and you with a grin on her lips, in her eyes, in the challenging toss of her horns.

You obey and pull off your jacket, the thick shirt, the undershirt. There’s a soft gasp from Porrim before she catches herself, but you can smell the surprise roll off her. Clearly the clash between her memories of you and your present self has put her off balance to be so upset now. You’re well-muscled, more than shows through the shirt, but the lines of wormstruts along your ribs are a surprise to even someone who thought they knew what they were about to see. You have a vindictive thought. You wonder if she knows that the wormstruts are minor compared to the long-healed disruptions to your brainpan. Your hair covers those scars.

“Don’t you want to know what the design is?” Porrim asks. It’s one part a poke at the-wriggler-you-once-were, determined not to let another decide for you, for all the good it did, and part the professional artiste trying to be sure that they don’t have an unhappy customer reporting them to the authorities, or worse, spreading a bad review among the clientele. You catch the tiniest glint of a tongue piercing when she speaks, her only other reflection the shine of her eyes and the little jewel set in her nose. It’s too small to determine the color.

“I trust your professionalism,” you state and turn your back to her as if there is nothing to fear from her. “And, of course, I trust Meenah entirely.” This too is a dig, and you don’t know if it’s against the troll currently behind you or the one your wriggler mind determined had betrayed you. You don’t know if they are the same person anymore, you certainly are not precisely as you once were. You seat yourself on the chair, drape your arms over the top and rest your chin on them, the old empress at rest on her throne.

There is a delicious scent of anger and more than a bit of caliginous arousal and shocked confusion as Porrim battles herself over her attraction to someone still in a wriggler’s frame. It is perhaps cruel to tease her, but you are very mortal, and the revenge, even improvised, has had seven sweeps to fester and finally temper. It will do her no real harm to know what it is to be the frustrated supplicant.

You feel the cold wash of disinfectant, colder as it evaporates, you feel the stick and peel of her template, the wet tip of her pen, then the stinging buzz of her inkwasp.

Meenah is close enough for you to see, were your eyes open, and you know she is watching her design, whatever it is, be inked into your still wriggler-gray skin. Porrim’s anger is still a delicious tang at the back of your throat, but it is dampening as she becomes immersed in her craft. You tip your head and fall asleep to the sting, and taste, and Meenah’s gaze, and know that Porrim will consider this yet another insult. You are smiling.

*

You are Porrim Maryam, inkwasp artiste, and you think you are crushing _so_ black for a troll whom you papped as a wriggler, a troll still wearing a wriggler’s form, if barely and not by natural means, a troll who can’t return your hate physically. You are not a grubfucker. You are a Jade. He is not a wriggler.

He is also not an adult, not legally, not physically.

You know every tattoo artist in the City. There are politely observed rules against tattooing wrigglers, not to mention the fact that tattoos will most likely be molted off in the final transition to adulthood.

You have never felt skin so smooth and soft and pale on your chair. The colors are going to be gorgeous. It makes you hate him more that he’s brought you such a canvas, that you can’t color him all in, that he dares to be content in decorating his form as if he’s either given up on ever attaining final molt, or values your craft so little that he will wear it and discard it like an outfit of clothing. You’re not sure which is worse. You could so hate him, and only harm yourself.

You flick the wasp off and switch it out with another. In the sudden silence you notice the deep even rise and fall of his back in a way you didn’t while concentrating before.

The misbegotten jerk’s asleep. You grind your teeth.

This will be your best work. He will weep with emotion. Or scabs and itching. Preferably both. You will take so many pictures for your portfolio. And you won’t keep any of them for private purposes. Well, maybe just a few.

You think the Tyrian is laughing at you both.

*

It’s almost midday before you finish. It’s just the outline and some shading, but your hands and back and neck, and even your horns, are cramped, and there’s no reason you can’t continue after this stage heals. It will also give the wasps time to recover.

You roll your chair back and set the inkwasp down in your lap and absentmindedly pet it. It buzzes with a sort of irritated and smug purr. It’s the third one of the night and you will need to give it a rinse off before you tuck it into the cage with the other two and the electrolyte solution. You are too professional to try to mix wasps between customers, there’s no way to sterilize them, but you are also too softhearted to destroy them. Wasps tend to make for smug but loyal pets. You will need to see how the tattoo heals before you start these three on new feed for the next stage.

You keep several hundred wasps in the back, all sorted into cages with the dates of use and names of customers and a strict schedule of who gets let out when so they don’t mix. The huge cages of unused wasps sorted by age and gender are the most rambunctious and you have to lock the doors before you let them out, in case a badly timed door opening lets them out to harass the well-bred neighboring businesses and makes them utterly unsuited for your work.

Sometimes someone who works on planet will take their wasp or wasps home. You keep adoption pamphlets in the back with care instructions. Without the specialized feed and the additional inks, they can sting but don’t leave tracks. Without the specialized feed, they tend to be pretty lazy and have to be quite aggravated to bother stinging at all. Feed and ink recipes both are a well-guarded trade secret.

You had studied with a Rust at the Church of Death for five sweeps before she would share her well-tested ink and feed formulas, developed over the length of her life and generations of her mentors before her. She’s gone now and you occasionally get a few of her customers and their connections, willing to shovel out extra to keep their work in the same artistic lineage. You hope that she would not disapprove of what you’ve done since, but there’s no way to know.

Steadyhand gave you your first wasps, two queens and two drones to start your owe breeding population. You inherited the last half dozen of her pets when she died last sweep, reduced since to two wasps now so old they are flightless. They have the run of your apartment and like to sleep on your lap when you read.

You know it to be irrational, but you are relieved to still have a living connection to her. You dread the inevitable night or day when they pass.

Until Steadyhand, everything you ever had came easily to you: state allowance, schoolfeeds, art, a circle of philosophical, shallow frenemies. Until Steadyhand and her meticulous standards and honest criticism and egalitarian concepts of beauty broke you down and built you up, nothing you had was as valued as it should have been. You are not precisely proud of your younger entitled self. You still aren’t precisely humble. But something changed when Steadyhand passed.

Her decline had been sudden, not even a perigee from the first symptoms. First her hands trembled and so she passed on further work and watched you work instead. Then her head on her neck trembled like a pennant in the wind, and she held to the walls when she walked, so, so slowly. Finally, she could no longer control her biological functions and, that night, her face was so, so shamed and tired, yet still so dignified.

She had asked something of you then, and you had agreed, the journeyman unexpectedly elevated to master. It was little enough compared to all that she had done in mentoring you these sweeps, and in her first leap of faith in the early perigees when you had come to beg a master’s time at the Church of Death and had been asked by others there why you were worthy of it, you with your long life before you.

In the hours before the next dawn, you had carried her out of the city and into the not-yet-wilds. On a hill at dawn, she watched the sunrise with you, or rather, you watched the clouds, the atmospheric symphony that greets each sunrise. Steadyhand watched the sun itself. Her last words were, “It is so, so beautiful, Porrim. Thank you.” And then, as you promised, you snapped her neck.

You were left cradling her worn body, the weight of it utterly dead, devoid of what had been your master and her steady, steady spirit. She was only 71 sweeps, hatched in the sweeps of the Summoner’s Revolution. When you are 71, you will not yet have hit your prime. You left her body there, as she had requested, returned to the beasts. You returned to the city to register her passing, and everything looked the same, but nothing was.

The room has been quiet with the absence of the inkwasp’s higher pitched injection buzz. Kankri’s breathing is a soft rasp. You didn’t hear or see her move, but the Tyrian, Meenah, is behind you, silent.

“Well?” You ache and she hasn’t said anything. If she doesn’t like it, it’s too late. “Do you like what you’re looking at?” It’s clumsy, but you’re tired, and you don’t know if you meant it in both senses, or just the professional one.

She closes the gap between you and her hands land on your shoulders, her face is suddenly tucked intimately close to your ear. “Mmm” It’s noncommittal, but her exhalation tickles your ear, makes your horns tingle. “Sufficient. For now.”

“He hates you, you know.” You stop breathing for a moment. Your lungs are already full of her scent, and you can’t tell if it is platonic hate or not. Either, from a Tyrian, might be deadly, for all that you doubt that Kankri would approve and she seems to care enough to rein herself to his sensibilities. You are already intoxicated. Your confusion from earlier tonight has not resolved itself.

“But don’t feel special. He hates himself more.”

“I hate you too, for what you did. And for what you didn’t do.”

Her hands tighten over your shoulders and she draws you up and back, out of the chair, her strength impossible to resist, her will more so. The wasp falls from your lap with an irritated buzz and crawls across the floor and up the cabinets to the sink. It probably won’t be able to fly for a few more days until it recovers. The chair rolls to the side. You are leaning back on her, kept off balance by her grip, your shoulders against her rumblespheres, your horns over her shoulder, your back curved, eyes and neck and belly wide open. You don’t resist.

“I could fuck you, if the both of you wanted it. Could fill you as he watched, held your gaze. We could even fill you with grubs, if that is what you wanted.” The second you is a plural, the rest singular, but it is unclear if she would hold a spade for you, or if they are such close moirails that she only holds his in the manner he cannot. You are a Jade, and you were not so precociously rebellious as to get out before learning the most basic of the cavern truths. You know the sheer value of the service she is discussing. That it is practically priceless and without equivalent makes the insult sting harder.

“Would you like that?” She shifts one hand to wrap around your neck lightly, the other snaking down to wrap around your front. She straightens you and nudges forward, almost politely bumping her pelvis into your rear. Your nook and bulge already betray you and you know she can smell it, the squiggle and leap of desire kindled in your belly. She draws away and you follow before you can stop yourself. She could push you away. She doesn't. Her lower arm shifts back a bit so that she is no longer wrapping it around you, but her hand is over your abdomen, fingers spread.

“He could fill you with Rusts and Browns you could watch them grow old before you do. Or Violets and Indigos, and you could see your children be told that they are lesser, that they hold monsters inside, see them outlive you, nails clipped, teeth filed to the new regime. Yellows and Blues, the engines and engineeriquists of Alternia, they would leave you behind. Teals, the swift cruel blades of law and regulation, they would judge you. Greens, maybe, and perhaps that would be kind, if you were lucky. Perhaps you would even have Jades and see them follow in your own footsteps, or his if we were lucky. But there may never be another like Kankri. And for your part in that, I will not forgive you so long as he is bound as he is.”

“Some distant night he will be dust.” Her voice is calmer now, less vengeful. She says it almost kindly, a burden you share between the two of you, for all that she will likely carry it longer, has carried it longer already. You think of her holding him as you held Steadyhand at the end, and your teeth ache with the clench of your jaw and the stinging of your eyes. Her thumb strokes your belly, circles, and your nook clenches even as your heart does. She continues.

“Whatever happens before then, he will still be more than you.” Your breath hitches in a sob. You’re not sure which part got you, but you believe her, and you don’t know if you are crying for him or for yourself. You turn away, and she lets you go without the least resistance, even steadies you as you turn too quickly and wobble.

“Know this and know it well.” You turn back to her and drown in the inexorable tide of her gaze and belief.

“My diamond is a blade, a scalpel of the new era. And you, you as you are now, are only the pretty pebble that first sharpened him. There have been stones since, immovable objects. And he has never once surrendered.”

“If you have no objection, you will start on my arms now.” And it is said in a professional manner, releasing you from her terrible gaze.

“I will need an hour to prepare the wasps.” Your voice does not quite tremble. It is a small victory. Your statement is not entirely true. They can be ready in half that, but your back and neck and hands are still tired and your mind is spinning, and your lower parts are just as confused. You will seize a moment to compose yourself before you throw yourself wholeheartedly into your self-destruction. It is entirely natural to want a kismesis to hone oneself. It is outright stupid to desire two.

You treacherous mind reminds you how meteor-brilliant wriggler-Kankri was. He was sleep-stupid when he got here but something in you wants to see the sparkle of the blade of his mind when his isn’t compromised. You have always been good at distaining what you have for what you want, but you’d like to think you’ve learned patience since.

*

You are Kankri Maryam, and you wake at nightfall floating in Meenah’s recuperacoon, the tickling weight of her hair and familiar embrace of her body and scent an anchor that guides your mind to your body’s location. You don’t remember how you got to Meenah’s apartment from the atelier. You suspect this happened something along the lines of Meenah in a borrowed suit of flexiarmor and you rolled up like a wriggler in a protective blanket. You can’t quite bring yourself to care. No one would have been able to see what was in the blanket, even if anyone that knew the two of you could probably guess.

You feel more rested and less restless than usual, like perhaps sleep was what some of your ideas needed to coalesce a bit further. You spend a few moments putting order to your thoughts. You have one hour to make it to your next appointment. Meenah’s forearms, linked around you, are inked in bold but delicate black lines with spots of fuchsia scabs, knots and tendrils and wires of something intertwining, things hidden within. You think you recognize a few sea creatures, the Sufferer’s symbol tucked in the interior of her elbow joints, where the skin is thinnest, where the inkwasp would hurt the most. The Irons are formed of two snakes, one with fangs bared and one with tongue out, sensing.

It’s the sign she made for you when the two of you were small, because you didn't have one, and she knew that the Dolorosa had had a son once and that this was his sign. Meenah used snakes because they are a symbol replete with meaning.

Secrets, secrets from the ground or caverns, medical wisdom, the balance between poison and medicine, that knowledge comes to those that listen, that even the smallest creature will strike when threatened, that _you too_ had a right to stand as you were. You know that it caused the Dolorosa pain to see it, and so you put it away, and have been signless for all but those few nights. Still, that Meenah wears _your_ sign, when you cannot, could not, it makes something in you both turn over and rest. You should not feel so territorial, about her, or your person. You do not correct yourself.

Your back itches but doesn’t hurt. You indulge in a yawn, lever yourself out, shower without contorting yourself to see what’s back there, (it doesn’t hurt, it will keep), and amble out the door with your pak, munching on the spoils of your fridge hunt, clean clothes stolen back from the “pile” where Meenah “steals” them but also washes, dries, folds, and keeps a neat stack of at least three full outfits for you at all times.

She hates cooking. Laundry is not your forte. You can’t spend all your days on the cot in the back of your office, no matter how many sets of scrubs you have stocked there, or the shower in the staff restroom. You don’t technically have a residence of your own, though the Dolorosa still keeps your wriggler recuperacoon freshly stocked with dilute sopor, hasn’t moved any of your wriggler furniture. You have meals or tea with your patron at least twice a perigee, more formal meetings as necessary, you truly value her mind, and support, and trust, but you’re perhaps not as grateful as you ought to be to have access to the unchanged room. You store your few belongings here or in your office. Most of your things, your case and tools and scrubs and endless supply of gloves, are actually PAP’D property, so it’s not much. For all that you practically run PAP’D, for all that you have respect among your co-workers and clients and a network of contacts, and co-researchers, and professionals in your field out to the colonies, as a cullee you can’t sign for an apartment or purchase anything above a certain amount without a co-signer, even if you have the credits. Meenah and you both like the same foods and neither of you likes the taste of patronage. It works out.

Alternia seems just a little bit more cheerful tonight. Or maybe it’s just you.

*

Your name is Kankri Maryam and you are, perhaps, a bit too wicked for the trust given to you by your position. You have a theory. You have a lot of theories, and this is not unusual. You have posted many theories to the RRDO forms, especially the specialized PAP’D forums, such as how stress in brooders and grubs speeds up maturation rates and reduces lifespan, or how trauma changes behavior and rewires the brain. You don’t have the funds or time to pursue most of them, but sometimes if you couch the question properly, someone else bites on, or the jade Caballistas see an advantage to funding research.

What is unusual is that, one, you have not previously shared this theory, and two, you are about to act on it. You are sure that this will cause a furor. It is for Alternia’s own good, though there have been ages of such justifications which only led to horrors.  

You are also sure that the fact that this continent’s Mothergrub started her decline just as the seadwellers withdrew is not a coincidence. You have not shared this theory either. If it is true, it is an unpopular truth and there is not much you can do. If it is not, well, then it does no further harm. There are few Violets left in the city after seven decasweeps of discrimination. You don’t have any wish to torture the few who are left with an ultimately futile ongoing state seizure of their slurry. You imagine Cronus, with his need to please, and the few older bureaucrats, fisherfolk and odd vocationalist left in the city, and you know that it is your duty _not_ to say anything. There are other mothergrubs on the other continents, in the colonies. All things die in their time. 

There are a lot of clade configurations, and they often change. The files that you are looking at are for a rare four-leaf of young Teals: two sets of hand-fasted moirails intertwined by two matespritships, occasional mild caliginous overtures across the diagonals, understood by all of them to be tertiary to the other relationships. They are complete unto themselves and, importantly, Teals, so most wouldn’t mess with them. Three are survivors of the Fever with very low slurry viability. The fourth is too old to have been affected. Two are legislacerators, and the other two hardly pushovers.

You have performed extensive interviews with them and among their colleagues and frenemies. You are positive that they are stable as a clade and that when they tell you that they don’t care what the wriggler’s caste is, they are being truthful. They can certainly afford to purchase any wriggler they want from any cullerium, or pay a brooder to carry one or more for them. They are still holding out hope for a wriggler produced from their own care for one another.

Another of your unshared theories is why and how limebloods were culled to extinction. It is also related to the documented decline in sopor efficiency rates over the past five centuries. Fortunately, since the Carbuncle of the Rift’s passing, the need for sopor has also been documented to be in decline. The library truly is a cathedral of knowledge both public and less then politically expedient.

Your theory is that you know how to produce a limeblood. You are positive that were you to go through the proper channels, it would be denied. You won’t be going through the proper channels. You have laid out options to the four-leaf. They understand their privileged position as among the few that could protect such a wriggler. You have revealed that you can promise them nothing, but that you believe that even if the wriggler is not a Lime, it will be as healthy or unhealthy as it would have been otherwise. You intend to deliver their child _if you have to sit on the egg and hatch it yourself_.

You are not a Sufferist. You are not a Revolutionist. You are not a Reformist. There are no other words for what you are doing than subversive and necessary. It will offend. It will not harm. You are doing this because it is necessary and important and you are the only one that can and will.

There are other phenotypes that have been culled previously as mutants, but who still crop up occasionally, electric blues, pale celadon greens, oranges that are not quite between the known shades of brown and yellow. Officially there are two shades of Violet, but you have met seven of the few dozen Violets in the city, and there were four shades among them, and while it makes you itch to know how many there would be if you had a larger sample size, you restrain yourself. You know that being the odd one can mean being the odd one out.

The colonies often run short-staffed and have long taken a more liberal view of what is a cullable offense. As you have extended your contacts in your profession, you have learned quite a bit about colony reproduction. Of the perhaps two dozen plus mothergrubs flung across the colonies, three died young, two were on the lost Class II ColonyArk _HIC Intrepid_ , one is ailing and unlikely to survive, and nineteen are thriving.

Eleven of those nineteen have started and completed brooding cycles, and ten of those are on just four colonies. Reading the hundreds of sweeps of records, and between the lines, you are forced to conclude that mothergrub viability is directly related not only to physical environment but to the slurry they receive.

Not just the quantity, or the quality in respect to who or what the donors are, or the variety which seems necessary to their continued health, but to the circumstances under which the slurry was donated. The most successful colonies have the most careful definitions of culling offenses. One of those colonies has already eliminated capital punishment, added communal schooling and government provided meal minimums, and it has essentially the lowest crime rate in the Benevolent Rationality.

It is highly likely that it is _troll stress pheromones_ that have been creating premature aging in the mothergrubs. It also appears to create a higher likelihood of paranoia and mental imbalance in the resulting grubs, though Sethin and you can only guestimate how much. The Drones were actively working at cross-purposes to the continuing health of the mothergrubs they served.

You don’t know if the Empress knew, but you have no doubt that the Caballistas did and do. The prematurely aging mothergrubs cycled through their own generations faster. You just don’t know what the Caballistas have been trying to breed into them. Or out of them. Or if it’s just a side effect of the circumstances.

Perhaps this continent’s mothergrub is declining because she was raised with violet through rust contributions and she’s not receiving such now. Perhaps a mothergrub raised on one combination of slurries cannot later incorporate new ones, which makes it unlikely that there will be many Violets from the next mothergrub. Perhaps it is something else entirely.

Colony IV3XYSsX985, known to its settlers as Better Than It Appears From Orbit I, mysteriously has no Greens. Raslth Pcrote, the head reproduction technician for BTIAFO I recounted for you how, subsequent to a virus en route, the colony was established with rust through violet, minus green, and the newly hatched mothergrub survived just fine with that slurry combination until the first shipfall where the crew was on planet during their seasons. The mothergrub had an infamously explosive case of diarrhea when the resulting slurry was proffered. There are still no natively hatched Greens, but the oceans of BTIAFO I are hailed as warmblood warm and largely safe and there is a growing population of brown seadwellers, anathema to the Empress. The native-born Violets and Indigos of BTIAFO I are also known to be exceedingly difficult to enrage. You have bid your goodbyes to more than one former colleague who has since moved there. They occasionally send you the odd trinket, including a pearl the size of your fist carved into a tumble of pearldivers, seaserpent lusii, and winged fish. 

Still. Whatever successes the colonies achieve, your business is the homeworld, the seat of the greatest current genetic diversity of both trolls and the native ecology which is still slowly revealing the secret workings of your people.

There is a burning ember in your chest that knows that Alternia needs every color. But perhaps it is only your warmblooded heart, ticking down the precious sweeps you have left to finish all that you need to do.


End file.
